Don't trust tiny fishes, they are the most dangerous.
For everyone who has used a URL shortener such as bit.ly or tinyurl.com and do any commercial links such as an amazon referral links I'm deeply sorry for you. These url shorteners strip your referral code and you end up making zero dollars.
This came from noticing that my father after a few months of use had been creating zero dollars. He was using bit.ly links and that was also my system. In fact I have answered thousands of questions using these links. I investigated and to my horror I found that these services were stripping the url. This makes all of your effort worth nothing and generates the url shortener companies lots of money. In fact they probably have gotten over half of what I should have earned and I could have spent the referral income on more products to create buzz and help users at some of my blogs like http://www.lenovos103t.com
So what was my solution? I began removing all of my bit.ly links and now I'm using my own system which guarantees that my links won't be modified. From some services I could not remove the links so bit.ly will make money off me.
My new domain:
http://acite.info - nothing here to see
Since I'm not a big web coder on the php, asp, and javascript fields I decided to create my own program that will create the links locally. I used BlitzPlus to generate the files and used Allways Sync to manage the FTP side of things. Those files are uploaded to the internet and now I have my own url shortener.
The end result is not as smooth as bit.ly but it gives me ownership of my links. I also now have to spend about $60 a year on hosting and domain expenses but owning your system keeps my mind at ease. I primarily use these shorter links on services like youtube and anywhere were excessive link length is unwelcomed.
If anyone's interested in further details about my system please send me an email and maybe I can develop something that will work for you. Its quite simple once you have it running. View some of these links on the descriptions of my videos at http://www.youtube.com/jessebandersen
Do you use url shorteners? There's fishy things on free services.
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